I always forget the single steps to create a new rails application that has a staging & production environment, can be deployed to Heroku and has the nameservers properly configured. So here’s the outline (so you and I never forget it):

Hereby I would like to introduce myself. I am a trade lawyer and specialist in the field of inheritance and work for a large law firm in the UK. We focus on family law, criminal law and inheritance law. Mr. Arendt asked me to sit in contact with you and go through all the steps necessary to your case.
As Mr. Arendt, the German language is not easy, he initiated me into your case and asked me to take over. Of course, with your consent.
I will be happy to respond to all your questions and concerns and to walk you through the procedure.
My contact details are as follows: –

Jenna Smith
Mobile: – (removed)

I’m pretty tied up by court dates. You can reach me but daily from 9.30 bis 11.00 clock clock and from 12.00 bis 14.00 clock clock your time.
Feel free to send me your number and let where I can best reach you and I’ll be in touch with you shortly.

Sincerely yours
Jenna Smith

And here is my Google translated reply:

Dear Ms. Smith,

thank you very much for your reply.

Allow me a brief explanation of Mr. Arendt, who will facilitate your working with Mr. Arendt. For some time, Mr. Arendt wants to be seen as a woman. Of course, a cautious person like Mr. Arendt would never direct your attention to this, but if you read between the lines, you’ll see what I mean. This pastor daughters just as little information with us.

I also thank you for your contact. Unfortunately, I can not reach you by phone, because I’m deaf and dumb from birth. I have for many years tried to learn with the best speech therapists together to talk a little bit, but my friends say I could possibly work as a voice actor in zombie movies. That is sad, but so is just life.

It would be enough at first, if you send me them extensive death certificate of the deceased and the account statement by e-mail.

I am sure all of you are exposed to spam on a daily basis – and one of the first lessons you have learned is that you never ever (ever!) answer any spam mails. Most spam mails are so dumb that it is almost impossible to believe that there is even one human being stupid enough to fall for it. One of my favorite spam mails of this kind reached Horst Prillinger a couple of month ago.

One spam mail that popped up in by inbox today was so bizarre that I felt inclined to answer (using a separate email account, of course). It’ll be interesting to see if I’ll get any replies. I’ve changed the author’s name of the original spam mail (although it is definitely a fake name) as well as the name I’ve used to answer it so you can enjoy them here. The catch is that the email conversation is in German. However – since this is a fun post – I’ve used Google Translate to get an English pseudo-translation of it which is quite entertaining in its own right.

I would like to first introduce myself. My name is Mr. Ferdinand Arendt, the personal lawyer of my late client was working as a private businessman in the international arena.

In 2009, my client died in a car accident. My client was single and childless. He left a fortune in value of $ 9,255,000 (nine million two hundred and fifty-five one thousand American dollars). Which is in charge of the bank zuständingen. The bank sent me that I have to imagine a Erbberechtigen, beneficiaries.

After more research, I did not receive any helpful information about the relatives of my late client. This is why I wrote to you because you have the same last name. I need your consent and cooperation to present you as the beneficiary.

All my efforts were unsuccessful relatives of my late client. Consequently, I would propose to divide the assets, you get 25% percent of the share, and 60% percent said they would then I am entitled. 10% percent will be donated to charitable organizations, while 5% percent are set aside for reasonable expenses, allowances in the international area.

All necessary documents include mutatis mutandis, the certificate of origin, in order thus to avoid questions from the appropriate bank. The requested documents are legal and begläubigt you need for the procedure. The property does not contain a criminal origin. The process is properly carried out without complications, the money transfer will be completed in accordance with law. All I need from you is your trust and good cooperation.

Please contact me at the e-mail address private. The proposed transaction is legal appeals that will protect you legally.

Sincerely yours
Mr. Ferdinand Arendt

And here is the my reply after Google Translate:

Dear Mr. Arendt,

Thank you for your email. I hope it does not bother you, I want you on your personal e-mail contact, but since you asked me for it, I think it is going exceptionally okay.

First, I would like to urge you to pardon. They introduce themselves as Mr. Arendt, but have the same then that you want to be titled as a lawyer. I suspect, therefore, that your name is actually male origin, your personal perception of gender is female, however. I will therefore also appeal to the female form, I hope it is in your best interests.

I am very pleased that you have suggested me because of my rare surname as heirs.

As sole Erbberechtigter it upset me but listen to how you intend to divide the inheritance of your mandates. Of course you have to be rewarded for your work. But you have to concede that 60% of the inheritance a little too much of a good thing yet. In other words, unethical. My suggestion would be that your remuneration aligns to your hourly rate. Can you be quiet spacious and include commenced hours as full hours. I’m not picky.

Also I would like to know why 10% will be donated to charitable organizations. Is the set testament that? What is it with allowances in the international arena?

You write that you need from me trust and cooperation. This can be set up perfectly. To give you further confidence can, let me please first send by e-mail to come:

– Testament, if any

– Death certificate

– Statement of the deceased

– Statement of expenses and allowances

– Proposals which gemeinnützungen organizations should be considered by the 10%

Remember back in 2000 when the human genome was completely sequenced for the first time? Well, guess what, you can now get your own genome sequenced in three weeks. That might be a little exaggerated, but there are services that sequence parts of your DNA and test it for known diseases, known risks and other facts that you might want to know about. Or not. All it takes is a little bit of your spit.

Most critics say that you might not want to know about all your risks, particularly not about those that you can’t really manage. You’re at risk of having an aneurysm in your brain, but the preventive surgery is even riskier than just waiting and wishing? Would have been better if you hadn’t known about it in the first place, right?

Well, I can definitely see the critics’ point, but personally, I do want to know about all that. Even about the stuff that I can’t change. Call me a control-freak or whatever. But before you’re going to use such services, ask yourself if you really want to know that much about your biological setup.

Note that you should also take the results with a good grain of salt. The results are based on studies and correlation statistics. Many of the studies might be biased, flawed or just to small to make really decisive projections about your health. The service I was using always cited the study or the paper it was referring to, which might helps you to asses the legitimacy of the claimed results. And you should always remember that correlation that does not imply causation. I can’t repeat that sentence often enough.

I was using the service 23andme and it is quite astonishing what they’ve found out about my genome.

They start by telling you stuff that you already know. Guess that should make you feel comfortable that they’re really using your DNA and not just make wild random guesses. So according to them, I have brown eyes, slightly curly hair and I am able to taste bitter tastes. Yep, three of three points. Thumbs up.

They then tell you stuff that you might had always suspected but didn’t know for sure: I am likely lactose tolerant. Sounds about right, but I still don’t like cheese. And then “Subjects who drank coffee consumed a slightly higher amount of coffee per day, on average.” – right you are again! (although “slightly” is a very humble word to describe the amounts of coffee I drink per day)

Then there is also the bad stuff: “If a smoker, likely to smoke more”. I suppose I’m lucky that I’ve never started to smoke. Let’s get back quickly to the good stuff: strongly decreased likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s. I guess if I hadn’t forgotten what that was I could be happy about it…They also tell you an awful lot about your blood groups which might be helpful in case you need to get or give a blood transfusion in the future.

There are a couple of surveys that they encourage you to take once you’ve signed up for the service. They use their users’ answers to find new correlations with their users’ genomes, and some of their findings are already incorporated into the service. They found some genes, for instance, that are correlated with the photic sneeze reflex. They claim that I don’t have it, and they are right again.

Although hardcore quantified self services like 23andme are definitely not for everyone, I highly enjoyed using it. So how are your genes?

We have just launched Ziggeo in open beta, a service that allows interviewers to screen candidates by video before actually meeting them. Which should save interviewers a lot of time.

You can use the service for finding roommates, job candidates or even dates (if you’re so adventurous!). Check out our blog to get more ideas about what Ziggeo could be used for.

Since the service is in beta, we would love to hear your comments. Just go there, sign up (it’s free!), and try it out. You can either send us an email or use the Feedback button to let us know what you think.

[latexpage]
If you’ve read the last posts in the series, you might remember that solving a parity games means to determine the partition into winning sets for both players and to provide witnessing winning strategies on the sets.

In our today’s post, we’ll have a look at a polytime-equivalent variation. Assume that we have an algorithm $A$ that takes a parity game $G$ and computes the partition into winning sets without providing any witnessing winning strategies, i.e.
\[
(W_0,W_1) = A(G)
\]

The question is, can we easily (in the sense that the blow-up is only polynomial-time) create an algorithm $A’$ based on $A$ s.t. $A’$ additionally computes witnessing winning strategies? The answer is yes and the iterative algorithm is fairly easy:

The basic idea is to reduce the number of strategies for both players on their winning sets until only one strategy remains for each player while maintaining the invariant that after removing strategies there will still be winning strategies left.
We reduce the number of strategies by removing edges from nodes with more than one outgoing edge. Note that we only remove player 0 edges from nodes of the player 0 winning set and player 1 edges from nodes of the player 1 winning set.
Let $e$ be such an edge. Remove it from the game and solve it again using algorithm $A$. If the algorithm returns the same winning sets, we know that there is a winning strategy left for the controller of $e$ that doesn’t require $e$, so we can safely remove it for good. If the winning sets change after removing $e$, we know that $e$ is essential for the winning strategy, so we can remove all other edges except for $e$ emanating from that node.

As we can only remove edges linearly often, the blow-up of $A$ is linear.

In the next post of the series, we will consider a related problem: given a pair of (total) strategies for both players that are guaranteed to be winning on the respective winning sets (without being given the winning sets), can we determine the winning sets easily?

I’ve just uploaded a Ruby Gem for creating bookmarklets. You can find it here. Have fun with it. A bookmarklet is a bookmark that loads remote content into the browser’s context of the currently viewed website. Services like Instapaper are based on bookmarklets.